5 ms·

<blockquote> Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Goog

<blockquote> Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. </blockquote> At risk of sounding bitter, this is really not the best advice to share with any group of startup entrepreneurs who might believe it and stake their business model on it. As with many of us here, I've struggled with this issue for years, and the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media. There are ways to tweak the signals, but it usually means having someone working fulltime on spreading word, and smaller teams building good sites often have better things to do than linkbait blogging (something I believe many of us would personally define as poor quality content). And even then this approach simply does not work in highly competitive fields where there is literally a decade of competition over search queries at this point, and competition from highly-funded startups and incumbents.

Angostura 14y ago
> the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media. I'm really not sure I agree. My sister in law is a french tutor in a small English town. She wanted a Web site and I suggested that she put something together using Weebly. I did some basics with her to ensure that reasonable keywords appeared in the page names, headlines and text etc. A couple of weeks later and if you search on "French tuition in town-x" or "French lessons in county-name" she comes up as hit 3 in Google - I think that's pretty good service from Google.
- bones6 14y ago
  In my opinion this really is the easiest way for quality content to rank and I highly recommend it. However, and not to downplay how nice this must be for your sister, but these are relatively obscure terms that don't get many hits. If you are trying to rank on some of the hottest money making keywords on the web, the type with a 6 to 7 figure payday, then you are on a totally different level of difficulty. Orders of magnitude different. Old domains with old content are heavily weighted. New guys have little to no chance. Only extreme viral content can achieve that and hope to be white hat. It looks effortless in the wild but in practice you have a lot of work to do to link-bait and that's still hit and miss. That's why a lot of "SEOs" turn to black hat, and churn and chew up the search engines to scrape whatever they can.
  - bradleyjg 14y ago
    If I'm looking for a French tutor in x-town England I want to find his sister. It's a win-win. Are any of the people you are pushing offering a win-win in these 6-7 figure payday, or are they just yet another asbestos law firm, that wants the same 1/3 as everyone else, and will fill out the settlement forms just the same as everyone else?
    - bones6 14y ago
      It's an interesting question, and I'm really just an arm-chair SEO when it comes to the world of extreme money keywords. What I do know from experience is that there are a lot of these extremely profitable keywords. With a little research you can figure out what the top 10-100 keywords are, by traffic, in the world or just in the USA. Some are totally 100% owned by big corporations who get the majority of the hits for that term and expanded phrases. Some might say that's legitimate because that big corp is the best result for that word. But there are plenty of other keywords that are owned by (formerly) regular webmasters who are now on top and fighting to keep it that way, with a sizable incentive to do so. These keywords are highly competitive and those webmasters will do anything it takes to keep the payday rolling in.
blauwbilgorgel 14y ago
As always with SEO it is dangerous to make broad sweeping statements. What works for a small local website, doesn't have to work for a big casino/travel website and vice versa. The advice I gave was sincere though. In practice I see many businesses aiming for links, when their content just isn't up to par. Quality content alone (without links) is enough to rank in many niches. If you get to the hyper-competative SERPS, sure, you can't escape link building or doing most of the work in-house. Droll: If you are about to enter a hyper-competative niche, you should already know what you are doing, else there is little chance you succeed. For me, in practice, creating accessible content is still one of the best things start-ups can do. Blog about two times a week and you will rank for it, you don't necessarily need backlinks. If you got an inaccessible site with poor content, you need (probably to buy) backlinks to make a dent. Disclaimer advice: Never stake your business model on uncustomized broad SEO advice. Especially when there are plenty of authoritative sources for sound start-up SEO advice like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM http://vimeo.com/39473593 http://vimeo.com/39473593 http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
- trevelyan 14y ago
  At risk of sounding acerbic.... :) (1) Can you provide an example of a business with over 100k in revenues that has been founded in the last 2-3 years in a remotely competitive niche and is at or near the top of the search results for the most likely general search terms? How about a bootstrapped business? (2) And can you honestly say that the mass of blogspam that regularly hits HN disguised as business advice is really high-quality content?
  - a5seo 14y ago
    Vayable (YC12) - coney island tour (first page) HelloFax (YC11) - fax (first page), google fax #4, Lanyrd.com (YC11) - mobile conferences #1, ux conferences #2, + hundreds of other high value kws TutorSpree (YC11) - tutor (first page), private tutoring #1, ZeroCater (YC11) - catering in sf (first page) MailGun (YC12) - email api (first page) With some time, I could easily find better examples. What you'll notice with these is that they are succeeding not by trying to rank for a handful of keywords, but hundreds or thousands of keywords. Organize and curate a collection of useful content of interest to your customers, and you will get Google to rank it. Most large aggregations of fill-in-the-blank are not well SEO optimized. If I were building something, I'd look at a niche outside of travel, real estate, and employment, and create an aggregation around that. Look at dogvacay.com -- launched in March 2012 ranked #1 for "dog boarding" in many markets.

Angostura 14y ago

> the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media. I'm really not sure I agree. My sister in law is a french tutor in a small English town. She wanted a Web site and I suggested that she put something together using Weebly. I did some basics with her to ensure that reasonable keywords appeared in the page names, headlines and text etc. A couple of weeks later and if you search on "French tuition in town-x" or "French lessons in county-name" she comes up as hit 3 in Google - I think that's pretty good service from Google.

bones6 14y ago
In my opinion this really is the easiest way for quality content to rank and I highly recommend it. However, and not to downplay how nice this must be for your sister, but these are relatively obscure terms that don't get many hits. If you are trying to rank on some of the hottest money making keywords on the web, the type with a 6 to 7 figure payday, then you are on a totally different level of difficulty. Orders of magnitude different. Old domains with old content are heavily weighted. New guys have little to no chance. Only extreme viral content can achieve that and hope to be white hat. It looks effortless in the wild but in practice you have a lot of work to do to link-bait and that's still hit and miss. That's why a lot of "SEOs" turn to black hat, and churn and chew up the search engines to scrape whatever they can.
- bradleyjg 14y ago
  If I'm looking for a French tutor in x-town England I want to find his sister. It's a win-win. Are any of the people you are pushing offering a win-win in these 6-7 figure payday, or are they just yet another asbestos law firm, that wants the same 1/3 as everyone else, and will fill out the settlement forms just the same as everyone else?
  - bones6 14y ago
    It's an interesting question, and I'm really just an arm-chair SEO when it comes to the world of extreme money keywords. What I do know from experience is that there are a lot of these extremely profitable keywords. With a little research you can figure out what the top 10-100 keywords are, by traffic, in the world or just in the USA. Some are totally 100% owned by big corporations who get the majority of the hits for that term and expanded phrases. Some might say that's legitimate because that big corp is the best result for that word. But there are plenty of other keywords that are owned by (formerly) regular webmasters who are now on top and fighting to keep it that way, with a sizable incentive to do so. These keywords are highly competitive and those webmasters will do anything it takes to keep the payday rolling in.

blauwbilgorgel 14y ago

As always with SEO it is dangerous to make broad sweeping statements. What works for a small local website, doesn't have to work for a big casino/travel website and vice versa. The advice I gave was sincere though. In practice I see many businesses aiming for links, when their content just isn't up to par. Quality content alone (without links) is enough to rank in many niches. If you get to the hyper-competative SERPS, sure, you can't escape link building or doing most of the work in-house. Droll: If you are about to enter a hyper-competative niche, you should already know what you are doing, else there is little chance you succeed. For me, in practice, creating accessible content is still one of the best things start-ups can do. Blog about two times a week and you will rank for it, you don't necessarily need backlinks. If you got an inaccessible site with poor content, you need (probably to buy) backlinks to make a dent. Disclaimer advice: Never stake your business model on uncustomized broad SEO advice. Especially when there are plenty of authoritative sources for sound start-up SEO advice like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM http://vimeo.com/39473593 http://vimeo.com/39473593 http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

trevelyan 14y ago
At risk of sounding acerbic.... :) (1) Can you provide an example of a business with over 100k in revenues that has been founded in the last 2-3 years in a remotely competitive niche and is at or near the top of the search results for the most likely general search terms? How about a bootstrapped business? (2) And can you honestly say that the mass of blogspam that regularly hits HN disguised as business advice is really high-quality content?
- a5seo 14y ago
  Vayable (YC12) - coney island tour (first page) HelloFax (YC11) - fax (first page), google fax #4, Lanyrd.com (YC11) - mobile conferences #1, ux conferences #2, + hundreds of other high value kws TutorSpree (YC11) - tutor (first page), private tutoring #1, ZeroCater (YC11) - catering in sf (first page) MailGun (YC12) - email api (first page) With some time, I could easily find better examples. What you'll notice with these is that they are succeeding not by trying to rank for a handful of keywords, but hundreds or thousands of keywords. Organize and curate a collection of useful content of interest to your customers, and you will get Google to rank it. Most large aggregations of fill-in-the-blank are not well SEO optimized. If I were building something, I'd look at a niche outside of travel, real estate, and employment, and create an aggregation around that. Look at dogvacay.com -- launched in March 2012 ranked #1 for "dog boarding" in many markets.